"Nothing is really 'beyond' you
if you go beyond yourself"

Blazing Reader,

I've been dreading it for months: Formatting my forthcoming novel, All the Humans are Sleeping.

With Much Ado About Corona, I hired someone to handle the layout — thinking it would save time. However, after sending the file back a dozen or more times, I realized it would have been faster to have done it myself. So, for All the Humans are Sleeping that's what I decided to do.

Yet formatting a book for mass production was something I'd never done. Sure, I've coded websites from scratch, designed full-page ads for magazines and handled the layout of many print newsletters. Still, for whatever reason, formatting a paperback novel felt "beyond me."

By coincidence, I just happened to read this quote in Dan Kennedy's No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business:

"A lot of people stop themselves by disqualifying themselves, deciding that they just aren't smart enough to do a certain thing. 'That,' they say, 'is beyond me.' That may or may not be true based on your current intelligence, learned skills, knowledge base, and organized support from others. But we are not concrete blocks. We are humans, with incredible capacity to rise to occasions... Nothing is really 'beyond' you if you go beyond yourself as is necessary for your goals."

That's the nice thing about goals, they force you to break through comfort zones and discover what you're truly capable of.

And it seems I'm quite a capable typesetter and book designer. After more hours and technical problems than I care to mention, the book is formatted and the cover is 90% designed (I still need to figure out how to do the spine). I persevered, and now have a novel that looks as good — if not better — than anything coming out of the big publishing houses. Proofs will be printed next week and my platoon of punctuation police will hunt down any surviving typographical errors.

Today is August 3rd. All the Humans are Sleeping will be released on September 11th — one day shy of forty days and forty nights. Mark your calendar!

Go beyond yourself & read great books,
John C. A. Manley

P.S. For more wisdom from Dan Kennedy, I highly recommend you check out his "Most Incredible Free Gift Ever" at: https://blazingpinecone.com/dan-kennedy

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/